Jeffery Deaver - Roadside Crosses

More to the point, he was a man, a species genetically fitted with persistent oblivion.

Boling now parked his gray A4 near Lighthouse Arcade, on a side street in that netherworld north of Pacific Grove. He remembered when this strip of small businesses and smaller apartments, dubbed New Monterey, had been a mini-Haight Ashbury, tucked between a brawling army town and a religious retreat. (Pacific Grove's Lovers Point was named for lovers of Jesus, not one another.) Now the area was as bland as a strip mall in Omaha or Seattle.

The Lighthouse Arcade was dim and shabby and smelled, well, gamy-a pun he couldn't wait to share with her.

He surveyed the surreal place. The players-most of them boys-sat at terminals, staring at the screens, teasing joysticks and pounding on keyboards. The playing stations had high, curving walls covered with black sound-dampening material, and the chairs were comfortable, high-backed leather models.

Everything a young man would need for a digital experience was here. In addition to the computers and keyboards there were noise-cancelling headsets, microphones, touch pads, input devices like car steering wheels and airplane yokes, three-D glasses, and banks of sockets for power, USB, Firewire, audiovisual and more obscure connections. Some had Wii devices.

Boling had written about the latest trend in gaming: total immersion pods, which had originated in Japan, where kids would sit for hours and hours in a dark, private space, completely sealed off from the real world, to play computer games. This was a logical development in a country known for hikikomori, or "withdrawal," an increasingly common lifestyle in which young people, boys and men mostly, became recluses, never leaving their rooms for months or years at a time, living exclusively through their computers.

The noise was disorienting: a cacophony of digitally generated sounds-explosions, gunshots, animal cries, eerie shrieks and laughs-and an ocean of indistinguishable human voices speaking into microphones to fellow gamers somewhere in the world. Responses rattled from speakers. Occasionally cries and expletives would issue hoarsely from the throats of desperate players as they died or realized a tactical mistake.

The Lighthouse Arcade, typical of thousands around the globe, represented the last outpost of the real world before you plunged into the synth.

Boling felt a vibration on his hip. He looked down at his mobile. The message from Irv, his grad student, read: Stryker logged on five minutes ago in DQ!!

As if he'd been slapped, Boling looked around. Was Travis here ? Because of the enclosures, it was impossible to see more than one or two stations at a time.

At the counter a long-haired clerk sat oblivious to the noise; he was reading a science fiction novel. Boling approached. "I'm looking for a kid, a teenager."

The clerk lifted an ironic eyebrow.

I'm looking for a tree in a forest.

"Yeah?"

"He's playing DimensionQuest. Did you sign somebody in about five minutes ago?"

"There's no sign-in. You use with tokens. You can buy 'em here or from a machine." The clerk was looking Boling over carefully. "You his father?"

"No. Just want to find him."

"I can look over the servers. Find out if anybody's logged onto DQ now."

"You could?"

"Yeah."

"Great."

But the kid wasn't making any moves to check the servers; he was just staring at Boling through a frame of unclean hair.

Ah. Got it. We're negotiating. Sweet. Very private-eye-ish, Boling thought. A moment later two twenties vanished into the pocket of the kid's unwashed jeans.

"His avatar's name is Stryker, if that helps," Boling told him.

A grunt. "Be back in a minute." He vanished onto the floor. Boling saw him emerge on the far side of the room and walk toward the back office.

Five minutes later he returned.

"Somebody named Stryker, yeah, he's playing DQ. Just logged on. Station forty-three. It's over there."

"Thanks."

"Uh." The clerk went back to his S-F novel.

Boling, thinking frantically: What should he do? Have the clerk evacuate the arcade? No, then Travis would catch on. He should just call 911. But he better see if the boy was alone. Would he have his gun with him?

He had a fantasy of walking past casually, ripping the gun from the boy's belt and covering him till the police arrived.

No. Don't do that. Under any circumstances.

Palms sweating, Boling slowly walked toward station 43. He took a fast look around the corner. The computer had the Aetherian landscape on the screen, but the chair was empty.

Nobody was in the aisles, though. Station 44 was empty but at 42 a girl with short green hair was playing a martial arts game.

Boling walked up to her. "Excuse me."

The girl was delivering crippling blows to an opponent. Finally the creature fell over dead and her avatar climbed on top of the body and pulled its head off. "Like, yeah?" She didn't glance up.

"The boy who was just here, playing DQ. Where is he?"

"Like, I don't know. Jimmy walked past and said something and he left. A minute ago."

"Who's Jimmy?"

"You know, the clerk."

Goddamn! I just paid forty dollars to that shit to tip off Travis. Some cop I am.

Boling glared at the clerk, who remained conspicuously lost in his novel.

The professor slammed through the exit door and sprinted outside. His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, stung. He paused in the alleyway, squinting left and right. Then caught a glimpse of a young man, walking quickly away, head down.

Don't do anything stupid, he told himself. He pulled his BlackBerry from its holster.

Ahead of him, the boy broke into a run.

After exactly one second of debate, Jon Boling did too.

Hamilton Royce, the ombudsman from the attorney general's office in Sacramento, disconnected the phone. It drooped in his hand as he reflected on the conversation he'd just had-a conversation conducted in the language known as Political and Corporate Euphemism.

He lingered in the halls of the CBI, considering options.

Finally he returned to Charles Overby's office.

The agent-in-charge was sitting back in his chair watching a press report about the case streaming on his computer. How the police had come close to catching the killer at the house of a friend of the blogger's but had missed him and he'd escaped possibly to terrorize more people on the Monterey Peninsula.

Royce reflected that simply reporting that the police had saved the friend didn't have quite the stay-tuned-or-else veneer of the approach the network had chosen to take.

Overby typed and a different station came up. The special report anchor apparently preferred Travis to be the "Video Game Killer," rather than defining him by masks or roadside crosses. He went on to describe how the boy tormented his victims before he killed them.

Never mind that only one person had died or that the bastard got shot in the back of the head, fleeing. Which would tend to minimize the torment.

Finally he said, "Well, Charles, they're getting more concerned. The AG." He lifted his phone like he was showing a shield during a bust.

"We're all pretty concerned," Overby echoed. "The whole Peninsula's concerned. It's really our priority now. Like I was saying." His face was cloudy. "But is Sacramento having a problem with how we're handling the case?"

"Not per se." Royce let this nonresponse buzz around Overby's head like a strident hornet.

"We're doing everything we can."

"I like that agent of yours. Dance."

"Oh, she's top-notch. Nothing gets by her."

A leisurely nod, a thoughtful nod. "The AG feels bad about those victims. I feel bad about them." Royce poured sympathy into his voice, and tried to recall the last time he really felt bad. Probably when he missed his daughter's emergency appendectomy because he was in bed with his mistress.